Veterans’ Web Sites Expose Pseudo Heroes, Phony Honors
From the minute FBI Special Agent Thomas A. Cottone Jr. saw Walter K. Carlson, he suspected that something wasn’t quite right about the decorated war hero. The two men met at a Washington Township, N.J., funeral service for Marine Second Lt. John Thomas Wroblewski, 25 years old, killed in Iraq in last spring.
“Thousands of people were there, but when that captain walked past me wearing the Navy Cross and a chest full of medals and ribbons,” Mr. Cottone says, “I whispered to my friend, something is wrong with that guy.”
Mr. Cottone, whose duties at the Federal Bureau of Investigation include investigating military imposters, subsequently followed his hunch, determining, he says, that Mr. Carlson, 59 years old and a local bus dispatcher, didn’t earn the medals he was wearing; in fact, Mr. Cottone says, Mr. Carlson never even served in the military. Mr. Carlson declined to comment.
Evidently this is a lot more widespread than I had thought.
The FBI’s Mr. Cottone estimates that for every actual Navy Seal today, at least 300 people falsely claim to be one. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society in Mount Pleasant, S.C., suspects that the number of people who falsely claim to have received a Medal of Honor is more than double the 124 living recipients.
Read the whole thing…
